Chip

Thanks for the Data.I have since turned the Ultrasonic into vertical alignment and improved the results. (it will work up to 4 meters at solid wall - soft objects reduce the efficiency and echos bounce-ing of objects can interfere )

The Servo is in slow mode at the moment - just for tune-ing . I am expecting it to go 2 or 3 times faster.

To get more accuracy i would have to mount it on a digital servo (ie more in-between steps)

TheMastahC

I planned to make a robot that would do the same sort of thing as this, but send the data to my computer wirelessly. Would then have a program to use this data to build a map of the environment. Could then do some path finding with the map to tell the robot how to move around objects. I figure the hardest part would be to have the program always know where the robot is, otherwise things would get unsynced and all that.

Chip

Recommendation would be to use "Processing" as it lends its self to serial data and also Graphic Visualization so at least you can see what is happening.At present i am experimenting with Making Robots with Senses (the project you see here is "Sight") which will be autonomous ie no external PCs.

designer2k2

Aniss

Very cool project. I've been planing to do the same or similar for some time. Only I want to send data by wireless from a robot to my PC.

And like TheMastahC I too have been thinking about how to let the robot know where it is when it's moving around ... WITHOUT a GPS. That seems like the real tricky (however interesting) part.

Anyone has ideas about how this can be achieved?

I was thinking about calculating approximately how fast and in which direction it's moving and constantly comparing that to where the objects around it should be. I wonder if it would be possible given the imprecise knowledge of it's location and ditto sensor readings. PLUS the fact that the object may move?!

Aniss

About Processing: Well I wouldn't recommend it. It's easy to program yes but the performance truly sucks. C# is a better solution allthough I'm not sure about the graphics rendering options? Perhaps not much better than Processing?

I recently finished programming a serial oscilloscope in Visual C++ based on Dark GDK (a DirectX wrapper), which I would recommend. It's almost as easy as Processing BUT it performs 1000 better, when it comes to graphics.

Otherwise I believe there are opengl wrappers around that should work with C# too....